S1 If I can give any tips about university it would definitely be to go to the open days because I find they give you a tour and you can kind of, I don’t know, see if you feel at home there, which I found I did at Birmingham. Also research into your course because obviously all the courses are so different and I found the course here at Birmingham was exactly what I wanted it to be; so I looked at all the module breakdowns and stuff and that helped me decide where I wanted to go.

S2 My advice for anyone choosing a university would definitely be to go to the open days and actually look round the campus and see how it felt to them. For example, when I came to Birmingham, I instantly really felt the atmosphere. I had a tour of the economics departments which is my subject I’m doing and then we walked to the accommodation. We walked to Shackleton so I could really get a feel for what it would be like to actually live there.

S3 University open days are very useful because it’s a chance to talk to academics, also to talk to students and get a real insight into what university life is like and also what your course is like.

S4 I think open days are invaluable if you’re considering any university. The only time really – I mean you can come and do like the campus tour and just get a rough feel for the place but the open day is the time where you actually get to see the whole campus at your own leisure. You can see the admissions tutors, you can see the buildings you’re going to be in, it might be other people on the same course; you get a proper feel for what living at that university and working there will actually be like. You can get dragged round a campus tour in an hour by anyone and that kind of gives you a rough idea of what’s going on, but until you actually get on campus and get a feel for it yourself with other people, it’s the only really time when you’re going to feel whether you’re going to be happy there or not.

S5 The open day showed me what was to be expected from my course so we had like an introduction lecture on the open day for Chemistry where you got to meet the course lecturers, we got to go into the labs, see what sort of equipment we’ll be working with over the couple of years that we’ll be studying at Birmingham.

S6 I think university open days are really, really useful. For me and a lot of my friends that I know, you can’t choose a university without actually going to visit it and when I came to the University of Birmingham I had a real feel for the atmosphere here. It’s very scenic and during the summer people actually sit outside on the grass and do revision, which is a good thing to do because you can hang out with other mates from different departments as well. I know that when parents come to visit with students as well there’s a lot of questions that parents and students might have different questions and a lot of them get answered.